“... not for pigs, or chickens): why would they ban it if there really was nothing to fear? The public took the hint, and began to waver in its passion for beef, and especially beefburgers, which, of course, include bits of dead cow you’d just as soon not know about. Ministers went on making soothing statements. The Agriculture Secretary, then ...”

“... Thomas’s notion was that if you looked after the sound it didn’t matter whether the sense took care of itself; that it was possible to write great poems without worrying too much what they meant. The pleasure one gets from a Thomas poem has nothing to do with the pleasure of working it out or even the sense that one day one will be able to work it ...”

“... made something out of Elizabeth’s being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than embarrass, and annoy, Herman by saying, here is the original letter, why on earth did you pretend to send a carbon? She knew, of course, Herman would never forgive her ...”

“... who first tried to assassinate a unionist politician, shooting the hardline Stormont minister John Taylor six times yet failing to kill him. All this meant the Officials could compete with the Provos for support in Derry and West Belfast, but it didn’t sit well with the nominal goal of the movement, which was the reform of the Northern Irish state, not ...”

“... some secret. That was why they forced him kicking and screaming into the trunk of a car and took him to the Cajón del Maipo. There, in the middle of the mountain night, they let him out and they shot him, just as he had done to so many of his own targets. Just as had been done to José Weibel, to Carlos Maluje Contreras. The man who tortured people ...”

“... her psychedelic, post-apocalyptic installation at Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries in 2021, which took full advantage of the neoclassical surroundings. It must have been hard to translate the work, which included sound, colourful video projections and otherworldly sculptures, to the compact space it occupies at Tate Liverpool. The cluster of video screens ...”

“... century that what Charbonnier calls the modern project of ‘abundance and autonomy’ properly took shape; the later extraction of enormous stocks of carbon from the ground, which liberated European economies from dependence on the sun and the seasons, merely allowed this project to be realised. Even before Watt’s steam engine and the first factories, it ...”

“... children to play with their son and daughter. For reasons that never quite emerge Bernstein later took up again what he somewhat grandiloquently calls ‘the project’. Loyalties – bearing the subtitle ‘a son’s memoir’ – is the result. It is a transparently sentimental book, and a slightly uncomfortable one. To his credit, Bernstein does not seek ...”

“... some came to be treated virtually as stewards and found themselves entrusted with duties that took them far beyond the bounds of the gentle little worlds in which they would otherwise have expected to spend their lives. The elder Tradescant was just such a man. By 1610, when he first comes into certain view (apart from the record of his marriage), in the ...”

“... remembered it now) and for which she had searched for years. No one had been able to find it. She took it as a priceless relic and kissed it.’ Dan Jacobson’s tone is cooler but just as intent: ‘nothing is more mysterious to us than the processes which suddenly present to our awareness a long-forgotten face or phrase from childhood.’ And there are ...”

“... should be temporarily garrisoned by the Chinese and British armies. Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang took the North and the British under General Gracey occupied the South. In a little known and not very creditable episode, Gracey’s men released the Japanese soldiers and used them to hold down the locals until the French returned. I once asked Vietnam’s ...”

“... Sailors tended to start their working lives young, even by 18th-century standards, and few of them took their formal education very far, but many if not most were literate, and not a few were self-educated. They read for pleasure, for profit and for self-improvement, since the ability to read, and especially to figure, opened up possibilities of ...”

“... sticks he was eating on his diet, so he closed the fridge door and went outside to the garage. He took his double-barrelled shotgun down from the shelf, took four shells from a box and put them in his bath-robe pocket. Then he walked back into the house, entered the bedroom of his old nanny, Mary, still holding the ...”

“... his sopranos, Shaw something little short of a compulsion to fall in love with, first, women who took singing lessons from his mother and then, after he turned dramatist, his actresses. This must be one of the hazards of creating works of art that need executants to perform them. Ordinary lovers are sometimes dismayed to find that their beloved is in effect ...”

“... Mr Johnson, as a young man, found it ‘unintelligible’. Now of course Mr Johnson in some sense took over from Mr Levin at what one is tempted to call the late London Times. He was a little worried, following on in this line: ‘Politics was my trade, not the universe.’ No doubt it was a diminuendo devoutly to be wished. Johnson is not indefatigable ...”